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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Left to themselves, children have a natural curiosity and a love for learning that is hard to suppress. How does an egg become a chicken, how does a butterfly burst out of its cocoon, why does a whale migrate? Author Tanya Kant answers most of these questions in her series on animals and is a hot favourite in our home.

What the Brat loved about this book was the way it simply presented facts. Divided up into double spread sections, each section deals with one aspect of a whale's life. What do whales eat? Why do whales migrate? How long is the journey? How do the calf and its mother stay together? The book doesn't need to be read in order and is presented almost in science book format, with diagrams, figures, and numbers. That said, the text is easy to read, the language simple and the explanations just the base on which one can build their knowledge of whales.

I do wish the illustrations had been more imaginative and less repetitive, but it seemed not to bother the children. The back of the book gives a migration map that the children had great fun finding on the huge wall map in their nursery. On it they followed where the whales fed in summer and where the calves are born. There's also a section on words that might be hard to remember, and their meaning. A great book for a child who is keen on animals. Not so much, perhaps, for one who needs to be held by great prose and clever illustration.